Category Archives: people
the same
I once sat in a small group in San Diego and listened to Henri Nouwen speak about how we are different and the same. He said that too often we define ourselves by how we are different from each other. Nouwen noted that we modern Americans are into being unique, but that this is not actually where the joy of life is found. Then he had one of his friends, who was disabled, speak to us. They were the same, he and Nouwen; both deeply needed to be loved and accepted.
Nouwen writes, “True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveler.”
The famous professor, writer, priest — a fellow traveler with us all. I like it, but I struggle to live it. Many of us do. There are so many angles by which we are tempted to declare our differences: republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, orthodox or free thinking, gay or straight, poor or rich, educated or blue collar, white, black, brown or red — the points of view encamp around us and invite us to join them for supper and an after dinner yak about — the enemy. We live, we speak, we react, we differentiate as easily as we breathe.
What is the cure? It is silence, sometimes. Yes we need to dialogue, to say what we think, to put up our boundaries, to air things out, to be honest, to negotiate and compromise and to work the differences out, and then sometimes we just need to do some serious shutting up. To see how we are alike, sometimes we need to quit talking about how we are different, and then we might begin to put effort into the seeing how we are the same.
Silence is a quiet opportunity to observe, similarity.
We woo each other gently, by quietness.
My cat Megan sat on my lap this morning. We said nothing. We luxuriated in a blanket and closeness and touch. We couldn’t be more different. She is wise and fuzzy and minds her own business. We couldn’t be more the same. We both needed a moment for a quiet purr, together.
A friend and I recently strung an internet cable through an attic. He pushed the cable through a hole; I retrieved it. We are different; we are so very much the same, especially when we share a common task, like stringing cable. We are the same in that we need each other to be successful.
The solution to different is to get busy doing the same.
I like it better than the different.
super moist tripple chocolate fudge
Into the paper cupcake holders in two cupcake pans I poured a thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake mix.
Then on top of the thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake, I poured a thin layer of sweet, whipped cream cheese.
Next — into each cupcake sleeve, I gently spooned, on top of the super-moist triple-chocolate-fudge and the sweet cream cheese, a layer of country-cherry pie filling.
Then I poured another layer of super-moist-triple-chocolate-fudge cake, on top of the surpy, cherry pie filling, which covered the whipped cream cheese, which covered the first layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake.
At this point I grew frightened and decided to put it in the oven — to kill it.
Twelve minutes later, when the little super-moist, chocolate, cheesy, cherry-filled bodies had baked, and then cooled, as part of the embalming process, I spread a thick layer of rich and creamy vanilla, cream cheese frosting on top of each one.
Then — I – ate five!
I hate myself.
Paul, the amazing Christian super saint once wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Romans 7:15)
Sounds like someone else has been into the super-moist triple-chocolate cupcakes. Of course, the truth is that we all have all been there, where we didn’t want to go, doing what we hated to do. We have overeaten cake or indulged a nasty character defect or shot off a mean-spirited repartee or harbored an infected and moldy core of unforgiveness. Or if we have not done these then we have indulged something else non grata, not fun, a fair bit of anguish, the loss of control, the doing what we don’t want to do, the regrets later. This is just what we do — the stuff we hate.
And so, what to do?
I backed our SUV into a telephone pole a few years ago. When I confessed my mistake to my wife, she said, “That’s why we have insurance.” Never once then or after did she say anything condemning about my driving mistake.
Good, very nice. There is a recipe in this. There is a culinary treat to write down, on a card and to keep in a drawer, to Facebook to a friend, to use again.
After any one of us have poured down a super-most layer of triple chocolate fudge blunder, we should pour on top of that a thick layer of sweet, cream cheese honesty. Then it is best if someone else in the kitchen with us adds a thick layer of cheer pie kindness. If as so often happens, another layer of triple chocolate fudge mistake is added, and it gets baked all together, as so often happens in life, we should all yet “cool it,” and top the mess with a thick swirl of cream cheese forgiveness.
Finally, once we have all our layered delights finished and spread out in front of us, then we should each eat five or more of them, just to help us get the layering pattern “down,” and to help us learn to make this unique way of preparing food a real part of us.
A mistake? It needs a loving relationship.
Then, ”We’re really cooking baby!”
who are you?
“`Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!’
`I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, `because I’m not myself, you see.’”
Alice, as in Wonderland, is caught up in one of our universal human dilemmas — explaining ourselves. The problem? Who we are is not fixed, and it can’t be easily explained to someone else or even to ourselves.
But we are not always as lost as Alice. Consider your bio or your resume. I wrote a short biography of myself recently for my website. It was supposed to be brief, but I’ve lived long enough that the trouble was in knowing what me to put in, what me to leave out. Then when my office manager transferred my biography to another website which had a different purpose, it didn’t quite feel right there. So I changed it, to fit the context. Like Alice, I had several iterations to choose from.
Resumes? The same thing. We tailor them to the job we are going for. We present ourselves as a good fit for a prospective employer. At resume time, we are all Alice, before the caterpillar, being asked “And who are you?” and we stand and deliver that we are an Alice that will fit in caterpillar’s world. And in that moment, we profess, to know ourselves. Fine, all is well, welcome to selling yourself. It’s appropriate and so professional to offer up a me-for-them on 24 pound linen paper with a water mark, a well-edited self that briefly presents the me of me that fits the them of them. “Make a good impression,” says my mom, your spouse and her best friend Tom as we all head out the door for the interview — ”Knock ‘em dead!”
But dead or not, at the interview or the funeral, there is yet, the Alice-dilemma. Someone may think I am this, or another may eulogize me as that, and I may myself put this or that on the fine paper , but who am I really? Who am I to me? Who am I when I-as-caterpillar asks me-as-Alice, “Who are you?” In other words, who am I employing when I employ myself? This identity is more difficult to get a hand on. It’s harder, penning the slippery, holistic, authentic day-to-day resume, the one we never write but always live, in front of ourselves and others.
My wife, Linda, is a survivor. Now there’s a label that offers an identity many people own. She grew up with a dad who said nothing too many times in a row after muttering nothing and yelling again nothing while devotedly popping another top off another beer after the beer just before the last one. One way Linda survived was to find her place among the stacks — books, and films in a place of something, of resources, a library. She found a career in storing and organizing help, information, resources. The result? She is an interlibrary loan specialist and a phenomenal resourcer of research professors and students. Have a need for a book or an article? “Call her.” She’ll get it for you or find out where you can get it. So while a support group might think of her as a “survivor,” she is really, through and through, a thriver. Contexts change; we change; labels change. Is she a child of an alcoholic parent, always? Is recovery always. How long does the past define us? Only as long as we let it.
I’ve noticed that people tend to like slice-of-the-pie assessments — “survivor, vet, precocious, slow, hot, not.” They don’t so much like the longer, nuanced, whole-pie critique, except when they write their memoirs. Most people go for the quick labels: ”cute, bright, slut, jerk, fun, good girl, bad boy, smart ass.” What are these really? Short hand idenitfications, stereotypes within the stereotypes of the stereotype. Some one told me recently, “You’re smart.” I thought, “Thin slice of me. You just haven’t seen me dumb, but sometimes I am.” Maybe I just haven’t let them see me dumb. I am, as we all are, a walking contradiction — smart here, dumb there, good here, bad there. Of course, obvious, sure — “Get real.”
I want to. I do. I do want to be authentic, and with authentic people, in the moment, congruent, projecting who we are and have been and still can be. This even means being honest about the me of not me and the them of the essential them. Paul, the radical Christian interrogator of the self, in one of his finest letters wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Touche! Paul has it right. He is not always the person he wants to be, and I, like him, do not always act out the me-of-me and the me-I-want-to-be. And so when I define myself, this must be included. Every resume needs an, ”If-you-want-a-different-twist-on-everything-you-just-read-then-talk-to-Frank category. Or perhaps we should add “Blunders” with dates and references.
The other day a girl told me that she was in recovery from abusing alcohol and drugs. I told her that in high school and college I had done too much drinking too, and had to move away from that to figure out who I was on my own, without a little help from my friends. As I confessed, I was writing my resume for her, an honest one, a human one, one that she could understand. I like that, authenticity. Who am I? I am a person very much like everyone.
And this gets at one more thing I’m learning — not to listen too much to talking caterpillars wherever they appear, but to look after something much more important, helping the them of not me figure out the them of the essential them. This works, nicely, in diverting the soul from excessive introspection. I live best not storying a self, not inventing a self, but instead spending time reflecting back to other selves who they might yet prove to be.
The other day, I happened on an ordinary thing, that later turned weird, a black mustard plant in the uplands down by the Sweetwater Salt Marsh who was freaking out. She was a beauty, a Cruciferae, yellow and spring green with long shapely roots, but she was so upset. She was out of it really, insanely exclamatory, ”Wow upon double wow and wow squared!” she gushed madly, her eyes bent on a black and yellow Swallowtail butterfly who was flapping home to the cathedral arch of a Sweet Fennel.
It didn’t turn out so well. I was told later, that when this mustardy beauty could take it no more, she grew all crazy for the air and ripped herself from the ground. And it was said by those who know that she proceeded across the marsh, beating the breeze apart with her quickly withering leaves, and with dirt still trailing off her roots, that she crashed into the ground only about 1oo feet from where she came.
“Oh!” I grieved for her and for all other selves not happy within the boundary of themselves, and then I went and sat down with Alice again to hear her out.
Later in the evening, I wrote the tragedy up and posted it on my blog.
Then I kicked back, stretched my long, spotted body, nibbled a leafy snack, checked the feedback from my maxillae, and thought, “Now this is the me of the essential me.”
Thump
I have a lot of friends. I have friends from school. I have friends from work. I have friends from church. I have friends in my family. I have friends in other countries. I have friends who are dead. I have friends who are not but pretend to be. I have friends who are fun, and I have some other friends who are friends because they aren’t fun. I have friends who I meet for a tête-à-tête at Starbucks, and I have friends who add me on Facebook.
By friends I mean a lot of different things, as we all do — people we got drunk with in high school but now have nothing in common with, a checker at Costco whose line we often choose, people who dabble in what we also waste time on, people who “get us” and leggo-people who used to get us but have now snapped off and don’t, furry friends — our cats and dogs, friends who we keep on call by the bedside — our favorite dead poets, painters, novelists or philosophers, and lastly and most importantly, our real friends, the cherished soul-mates who hang on through it all and just won’t let go, like Taylor in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Pigs in Heaven, who won’t let go of little Turtle — the mythic, profoundly archetypal lost child, “six pigs in heaven and the mother who wouldn’t let go.” This is it, the core of it, the will-not-let-go friend.
I’ve told my daughters, trying to help them with the vagueness and occasional hurtfulness of the thing, “There are lots of kinds of friends, all kinds of levels and layers and lunacy. Enjoy them all.” It’s hard. Friendship is a garage that we throw a lot of different stuff in, and some of the stuff gets lost and some gets found again and then lost for good, but, “No,” found for good again. Crazy!
Whatever the “How To” books tell us, friendship certainly isn’t something we can control — much. People will make their choices. They will do what they will do or not do, and what they don’t do will perhaps kick us in the head the most. Martin Luther King said it, “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”
King’s observation is clever, provocative, probably garnered in the civil-rights trenches and brutal, when it happens to you. Plain and simple: People — when things get messy — will shut up — way too much! They won’t ask, and they won’t want you to tell.
Silence is the most eloquent monologue of indifference. Something happens. Silence. More silence. Wow! It is singularly dysfunctional.
And then there are the friends who in the wars, switch sides and become the enemies. Funny how that works, “Et tu, Brute?” Samuel Butler quipped that “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
One feeds the chickens until one day — boom. Get out the crock pot, “I love my chicken falling off the bone.” And in a like manner, one man feeds the psyche of another man, until, one day, bam. “Strike three! You’re out!”
It happens. Life goes on. Time shows friendships, real and not. I’ll take the real, even with the not thrown in, the hurley burley of it all, the rough and tumble, the in and then out, it’s worth it. I love my friends. I love the people who love me. And the ones who no longer love me make the ones who still do, seem sweeter yet.
Someone once said, “A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.”
“Come on, help me hoist these cold, clammy bodies, buddy. Let’s move ‘em out.”
“Nice work! Hey, will you kick that foot sticking out of the closet back in so I can shut the door?”
Thump.
“Thanks, friend.”
Us and Them
Recently, on a Thursday afternoon, I stopped by the farmer’s market near my work. It’s on Center Street, between Third Ave. and Church Street in Chula Vista, California. A soft, cooling afternoon breeze was coming in off the San Diego bay.
Ray’s Shoe Repair is here. A red neon sign says “Nails” at the place on the corner. Fat, short lemon trees and bins of lemons are painted on the side of the wall between the two. The First Southern Baptist Church of Chula Vista sits at the far corner. Smooth, white Greek pillars pose in front of red brick facing.
As I crossed Third and approached the farmer’s market, walking with a couple of friends, the famers market gently emanated that one-day-outdoor event feel, a kind of pseudo-gypsy mana, a small, Euro-market ambience with canopies covering fresh fruit, flowers in plastic cans and hand-crafted jewelry. It was a temporary, civic improvement to the area.
The hand-written signs (black marker on cardboard) behind the fresh produce proclaimed proudly, “Grown in Carlsbad.” Carlsbad is a beach resort city north of San Diego, known for expensive homes and its eastern edge of commercial flower fields. There aren’t so many cardboard signs there.
I did what we all do at the produce market; I picked carefully, rejecting the fruit and vegetables with cuts and scars and culling the ripe, unbattered pieces from the bins. I picked out some nice white squash and some fat, ripe tomatoes.
At the end of the produce stands was the food court. The “Indian Fusion” cuisine caught my attention. The owner was giving away samples, yogurt dips on Indian bread and hot and spicy chicken. It was all a curious and fascinating blend of Indian, Afghani and Chinese food. It was exotic, tasty, spicy, and I found myself suddenly longing for a large cold Coke – fusion.
It’s somewhat exciting, really, to meet people selling Indian fusion food, to dialogue, to eat experimentally. On Center Street there are opportunities.
I brought my veggies and went home thinking about culling. We all do it. We cull Main Street and Church Street for the best. And we reject the worst, or what we think of as the worst. It’s normal; it can get weird.
I ran into a guy the other day who was doing some serious culling. He said to me, “The country is going downhill,” he proclaimed to me. “The Muslims are building mosques all over the place.”
“Really? “ I said.
“Yes,” he said. “They hate us. They are trying to kill us.”
I paused. These kinds of conversations require an occasional pause.
“Have you even read the United States Constitution?” I asked.
He looked up at me from his bench.
“It seems to me,” I said, “That there is something in there about the free exercise of religion.”
He sputtered, but I didn’t let him get up a head of verbal steam again.
“Do you remember what Jesus said about people who we think are our enemies?” I asked him smiling.
“Oh, you mean that we are supposed to…”
I went for his spiritual throat with another smile. “I think he mentioned something about loving them.”
I reached down to his bench, shook his hand, wished him a good day and walked off. He was still frothing a bit, but I felt that at least I had taken the moment to throw a brick under his mental front tire. We were on Fifth Ave and E Street, not far from Center and Church. If you go down Fifth and take a left on G you run over to Third Ave and from there you can walk to Center. It’s not that hard to get to Center Street.
There are actually a million ways to get to where we want to go. One basic way is to say what we are against; the other is to say what we are for.
It’s okay to say what we are against, but I’m for saying more of what we are for. I’m pretty burned out on the narrow, negative, judgmental verbal ordnance that gets launched as conventional wisdom in the nail painting shops, churches and internet chat sessions just off Main Street in downtown America. There is a lot of such railing in America, liberals railing against conservatives, Republicans railing against Democrats, the poor railing against the rich, the Christians railing against the gays, Muslims railing aginst Christians and back and forth, stereotypes and overgeneralizations galore.
I suppose it’s okay to cull your fruit, that’s what we do everywhere, and to it’s okay to say whatever you think. Well, we all will no matter what anyone else says. But the fruit we like isn’t necessarily the best fruit, and the fruit we don’t take home somebody else probably will. And really, does the rind and surface color we judge tell all. I’ve picked fruit that looked good in the store and found it rotten at home – and church.
In the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to make the aquaintance of some Muslims. Some of them have been brilliantly educated, enlightened and more than accepting of me and my differing beliefs. And, I have had the opportunity to make friends with some brave young women who are gay. I’ve listen to their stories, and I’ve felt their pain. And, I have made friends with friends who are not homed, and some who don’t want to be.
I have friends who don’t know what they think, but that they are sure they don’t think what they have been told to think. I have friends who are stoned drunk most of the time but who believe more deeply in God that some people who go to Church Street every Sunday.
I have friends in South Africa, in Brazil, in England and in America. Many of them think differently than I do. That is why I like to go see them. But often I find that they think the same as I do. I like that too. I’m interested in how we see things the same. There is a lot there.
And, I’m for getting out on the street here at home more, more farmer’s markets, more locally grown foods, more relationships with local growers, and locally owned eateries, less Von’s and Albertson’s. They are great stores, but the chance to mix, on the street, to discover Indian fusion food, to meet someone outside of your comfort zone – it’s appealing.
And I’m for listening more. And I’m for feeling more. I’m good and sick of people who can’t feel, who won’t feel what they feel and who won’t let themselves feel what other people who are not like them feel, who refuse to feel other people’s disasters. It is not enough simply not to attack. I like W. H. Auden’s poem, Musee des Beaux Arts.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along …
It’s not new that we don’t identify with other people’s joy and pain. Auden makes his insight come alive with the infusion of an artistic allusion.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away from
Quite leisurely from the disaster …
A boy falling out of the sky.
It is true; we all sail blissfully on; we plough our fields; we cull or vegetable, while Icarus falls unnoticed out of the sky. But, I wonder, if we were looking around more, might we not notice such things, and choose to go to the rescue, of foreign legs disappearing into distant seas?
I’ll say it straight up. I think that it would be best if we were more in touch with people who are different than we are, and if we made more effort to understand their flights and their disasters.
I think we should replace blame with understanding and that we should substitute forgiveness for judgment. Life isn’t simply us and them, it’s more just — us.
You can shop where, you want – it’s a free country – and you can cull your fruit as you like, but this much is true: The fruit you select isn’t necessarily better than the battered pieces you reject.
Oncoming Spring
“The conflict with the inspector happened because she couldn’t read the social cues,” I said, ”It’s part of her disability.”
“Oh, I totally get that,” she said, standing behind the food counter. “It’s just that other people don’t.”
“I know,” I replied, “and then it’s like they think she’s just making a choice to be difficult, but she’s not. It’s because of her brain damage.”
I could feel a bit of extra humidity in the corner of my eyes. I could see it in hers too. We looked straight at each other in a way people just don’t do across a public counter. In this instant we bonded over our understanding of the pain resident in the complications of relationships compounded by disabilities. Our eyes seemed to reach out and touch.
I wonder lately, are there really any other kinds of human relationships, ones without disabilities complicating them? And do we often stop to look at the many shades of emotion resident in our failed attempts to communicate with each other?
A day earlier I sat a lunch in a restaurant on the other side of town.
“Fear isn’t a disease,” he said. “It’s normal. Everybody has it.”
I sat there not eating, just looking at the astonishment on his face. It was fascinating, his knowing smile. It had taken 30 years of brilliant psychiatrists getting it wrong for him to realize that inside he knew the truth all along.
“Everybody is afraid,” he said, “ not just the people who did drugs in high school”.
“Etiology is tricky,” I thought to myself; the professionals made a muck of this. They blamed his fears on him.
I nodded to him, flashing back to a few of my own seasons of terrible anxiety. And I thought about how I keep running into this — learning embedded in feeling. How being human is about some kind of rich affectivity realized and accepted.
I will always remember kicking my fins along the coral wall in Kauai, excitedly pushing myself toward a large school of Achilles tangs. I still remember the joy of their dark purple bodies, their bright orange tear drops and their blazing white highlights, the sudden and odd thrill of the unexpected combination of vibrant colors swimming together like some kind of underwater mobile home painted by a madman.
I think that emotions are like this. You turn a corner, kick a couple of times and there — a new school of them, unexpectedly colored, swimming with you. Then, as you approach, off they dart together into the deep, you in mad pursuit of something amazing.
I like this. It reminds me of Charles Burchfield’s painting, “Oncomming Spring,” where the cold, white snow is melting into the ground and the trees are all ablur with motion, everything moving in the storm, all of nature alive to the wind and the bright yellow warmth that will bring life to the dry, brown trunks. I like how the windows open between the tree frames to blue skies. Life is found in such movements toward things not yet fully realized.
Older, I’m more aware of the storms within. Now I find it increasingly odd, how relational Achilles heels and all the emotions schooling with them are so much rejected in the public sphere — those places where we too much see the tight lips, the polyurethane expressions, the harsh judgments and the keratitis sicca.
I feel.
I am.
I am open to feel.
I grieve over the emotional damage that has been done by people who refuse to acknowledge the validity of feelings, those who have said to others, after causing extreme pain to them, “I’d advise you not to talk about how you feel. That’s not going to help here.” Cause a reaction, and stifle the reactor?
I grieve over those who only say to their children, “Don’t be afraid.” Better it be sometimes said, “I too have been afraid. I know how you feel.”
I grieve over how those who have caused extreme emotional hurt to others have then turned and said, ”I’m not hurt,” as if it is possible to damage others and for that not to damage ourselves.
It’s storming. And I will be a Charles Burchfield and go out and paint it. This is reality. I see windows opening up upon our emotional realities.
This is reality, beautiful, heart wrenching emotional reality, to go out into the tossing ocean and swim with the purple and orange tangs again.
Strike Three
“Strike thee,” called out the umpire, jerking his hand up, and with that the star player for the San Diego Padres was out, done, over. The hope for runs was flew up into the lights like a mist — there and gone in the cool San Diego evening air.
The San Diego fans went totally loud with booing, yelling, grieving, resisting. It was wild and western, and I was glad to be at the ball park to see the fun.
Andrian Gonzales turned to the ump, protested the call, got in his face, wouldn’t let it be. Buddy Black came to the plate. He joined Adrian against the ump.
The umpire threw Adrian out of the game. Then he threw Black out of the game.
The stadium went berserk; the crowd metamorphized into a huge, loud angry mass of protest. The ump was wrong. We were right. If he could have, the umpire probably would have thrown us out. We were also in his face to long. But play resumed shortly and we remained.
While the Padres were up, every ball got a cheer; every strike against one of the Padres got a boo.
The ump was right when he made calls for our team; he was wrong when he made a call against our team, even if it was right. It became semi-comical! The game took on a kind of silly, goofy feel, the ball and strike calls more the focus than the action of the players. It was like the game turned into a argument between the spectators and the umpire.
I kind of got into it. It was a new plot for the evening, a baseball drama, and we, the crowd had now taken the field. We had seen an injustice of a minor sort, and we were making our dissatisfaction known.
The game played out and ended. We had our say but it changed nothing. The umpire strolled off the field. I thought he looked a little lonely.
It was interesting, as I reflected on it later, how in the disagreement emotions seemed to have taken over the player, the manager, the umpire and the crowd.
Baseball, Chevrolet, apple pie and a rowel at the plate — it was about as American as you can get. We don’t see things the same here. We even love to disagree. And when we do, we do so as a stampeding herd with instinctive, stomping, running momentum. But the game ended, and we separated to our own homes to squabble with each other.
The next time I went to a Padre game, we didn’t carry on where we left off. Were these different fan? Was this a different umpire? Who could tell, but what had been a big deal had been forgotten.
This all seems very familiar to me. I think I’ve seen this before, differences in perception, difference about “the call” that was made. I’ve seen this in my marriage, in my education, at my job, with my friends, in my church.
A few thoughts come to mind about the good old American past-time of not getting along. Despite the plays and calls that are made, the game goes on and so does the fun, except maybe for the umpires. But who knows, perhaps the umpire at my crazy game had fun too, not so much that night, but jawing about it later with his peers, reminiscing and saying, “I remember the night in San Diego when I thought …” And the others nodding and laughing and throwing in, “You should have seen my night in ….”
So what’s in this for us, say if we apply the whole event to life. Well, I think that people in power may tend to throw people under them out too easily when they disagree. It’s not so good. It can give the people watching an ulcer and rough up everyone’s psyches on a perfectly good evening. On the other hand, I think we players should try not to be so stupidly rude and stubborn when we disagree that we get thrown out. It’s boring to sit out a perfectly good game in the locker room.
And finally, if we look around with any degree of objectivity, we are likely to observe that our own emotional reactions of disagreement, and those of others, at the ball park or in the bedroom , are apt to be surprisingly comic, even sometimes ridiculous.
In conflict, I think we may need to do what doesn’t always come easy but would make things easier, that is to keep having fun and to keep laughing, especially at ourselves
Voices Ignored
I suspect that we quiet the voice.
We may even seize it, smother it, yank it out from under the pillow and beat it into silence.
A rather fascinating case study of this is professional cyclist Floyd Landis. Floyd won the 2006 Tour de France, but was shortly thereafter stripped of his Tour title for doping. He tested positive for synthetic testosterone after Stage 17. At that point he went into hyper-defensive mode, mounting a vigorous defense maintaining his innocence, even a 320 page book, Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France.
But recently, Floyd has dropped his long time protestations of innocence and confessed to doping throughout his career. He recently wrote up a series of e-mails to cycling officials and sponsors detailing his use of banned drugs. He has broken the cycling code of silence on drugs, but he has broken more that that too.
It’s interesting, what we do with what we do wrong. Store it in a secret place, maintain our innocence, lead other people to believe our lie and profit from it.
There is a lot of indignation and anger now over Landis, and I understand this. He ripped us off, even taking a significant amount of money from donors supporting his quest to prove himself innocent. But really, few of us can honestly say we don’t understand how Floyd Landis could do this. It’s simple: profit motivates. Lies come easily to many people when there is a check and a place in history to gain.
I don’t feel superior. None of us should. I don’t have a big secret, most of us don’t. But which one of us hasn’t indulged in some behavior or thinking that didn’t meet the standard? And which of us has not been completely forthcoming so that we could preserve or gain something?
We tend to minimize our wrong doing, push off the uncomfortable feelings of guilt, talk over the voice of correction that seems to be so easily be bludgeoned and quieted into oblivion.
“I don’t feel guilty at all about having doped,” Landis told ESPN.com. “I did what I did because that’s what we [cyclists] did and it was a choice I had to make after 10 years or 12 years of hard work to get there; and that was a decision I had to make to make the next step. My choices were, do it and see if I can win, or don’t do it and I tell people I just don’t want to do that, and I decided to do it.”
Interesting. People gave their money to support him. People cheered him on. People invested time and money in his defense. People are hurt, and Floyd doesn’t feel, guilty.
But despite the blustering, the fumbling attempts at honesty, I bet that privately Landis has taken himself to task for all this. What a mess. This has to be embarrassing, acutely agonizing for him at some level. He not only lost his Tour title, but also his marriage, his savings, and his credibility.
What’s at the bottom of this?
I have been thinking lately about how we avoid the voice, and the voices.
That voice is the one that comes from within, from what we call our conscience. Most of us have been taught that honesty is best. Landis was surely taught this in his Mennonite upbringing. Most of us believe that the sports playing field should not include banned performance enhancers. And most of us hear a voice within when we lie or cheat that says, “This is not so good. This is wrong. This is something I should not do or that I should stop doing. “
Landis heard that voice of conscience, and he beat it down. “Others do it. You have to do it to win. I’m just leveling the playing field.” He made wrong right in his mind.
Interesting. But conscience isn’t the only voice he ignored.
There are two more.
The second voice Landis pushed away is the organized voice of the community. It is the voice of the race organizers, the voice that sets the rules and awards the winners and the voice of the spectators, cheering on the race. That voice said, “No,” ahead of time, no to banned substances, no to cheating and no to lying. Landis totally discounted that collective voice.
Therein lays the angry news reports and the public indignation. We said we didn’t want this in the sport, and he ignored that while pretending he didn’t. What must Landis’s co-author of his book be thinking? All those interviews, all those hours of research, all that trust that Landis was telling the truth to the public – trashed by his eventual neck-wrenching flip-flop.
This kind of deafness to what others require, what they need and want, is abusive.
The last voice Floyd pushed aside, God’s. “Don’t lie,’ goes the ninth commandment. Faith and sport cross paths here. As God knew before cycling existed, lying is really common, but it makes a muck of things pretty much everywhere it occurs. There is good reason why many athletes pray and teams hold devotions. The playing field includes huge pot holes to fall into, but divine help and godly morality really help keep things safe and sane.
“I am innocent,” Floyd has said. “I am not innocent, “Floyd has said.
In the end, perhaps the most appropriate reaction is grief.
Important voices were ignored.
Grumpify or Gentlize?
In college I majored in literature. I love Shakespeare! The verbal density; it is rocket fuel for me. I taught literature at the high school and college levels before switching to people farming, my current passion. My daughter is now a lit student at the university. I love it.
I’ve traveled to England, spent time in London. This year my daughter will spend a semester in London studying literature. Cool!
Like produces like.
It’s beautiful; it’s normal; it’s good. It can be a problem.
How?
It’s the problem that occurs if or when we get after people to be like us. It’s fine for people to make a choice to choose to be like another person. It’s not fine when people make a choice to force someone else to be like them.
The problem comes in the form of the criticism, the evaluation, the judgment that expects, that demands, that requires sameness, conformity.
Is this common? You betcha! I hear old people whining about how things aren’t right, how they aren’t the way they used to be. I hear young people who are very ramped up about what they like, and don’t like. They are strong, on the attack, very confident that some things “rock” and some not.
Fine to have preferences, not fine to impose them. “Oh, we don’t do that,” everybody pretty much claims. “It’s not good to force things, right?”
And yet we do.
Politics, religion, education, business, parenting — so many areas of life take up the sword and hack, hack, hack at people to change, to conform, to measure up.
You hear it, “You can’t trust politians.” Really? All of them? None of them are trying to help us?
If you are a good Christian, then you will … blah, blah, blah. Someone told me recently that all Christians should vote according to a slate a Christian organiztion has published. Wow! Really? I think God expects each of us to take responsibitity to judge for ourselves what is right or wrong.
Teachers are now, according to some, doing too much teaching to the tests. All teachers?
The people who lost their homes in the recession were too greedy and unwise and the took bad loans. Wack, wack wack!
Parents are too busy these days to raise their kids. Smack, smack, smack.
Grumpiness, criticalness, opinions, “my understanding” often becomes a club. We pound the crap out of people with our thinking, while claiming to merely be making a statement and clarifying our opinion.
Two options present themselves as a person matures: gentlize or grumpify, become gracious and understanding or overgeneralize and become as narrow and mean and dangerous as a switch blade knife.
Like produces like is at its best when it is inspired, at it’s worst when it is whalloped and hacked into another person’s softly developing personality.
Unwise ones get hard. Wise ones mellow and soften as they bump along through life.
Wise ones? They inspire the “like” not require it.
Not Negative
I am choosing not to be negative.
A big guy in a cowboy hat came by my office recently asking for money. He told me a church down the street had just filled his gas tank, and he was wondering what I would do to help him too. I gently told him that I didn’t give out money in situations like his, but that I would give him some food out of our pantry if he wanted that.
After a little discussion, it seemed he wasn’t interested in the food. We went outside and as he was walking off, he turned back and said, “The Lord told me to tell me you to repent.”
I was a bit stunned. He kept walking. But gathering my wits, I called after him, the first and most honest thing that came to mind, “Hey man, that was really weird.”
He just kept striding off, down the sidewalk, then he put both hands in the air and pointing his fingers to the sky shouted, “Praise you Jesus.”
What to do?
I laughed, told others the story and we laughed again. It was really pretty ridiculous. Later, I got to thinking about it, and I decided to repent of everything I could think of that I might have done wrong in the last month. Why not? I probably did need to repent. Don’t we all?
A few days ago, someone bought me flowers to plant. I got some into a pot, but put some aside for later. When I went back to the ones I didn’t plant, they were dead. But the ones I planted and watered are now stunningly beautiful.
What am I thinking about?
I am thinking about my thriving leaves and blooms, green and white and purple in the pot at my office door.
My cat runs from me when she sees me downstairs. She thinks I’m going to kill her, just like I did yesterday. I take her upstairs into the bathroom while I shower. She has her own towel that hangs on the door. When I get out of the shower, I put a little water on her back, then fluff her up with her towel. She wheezes and purrs very loudly, rolling on her back.
Tomorrow, I’ll catch her when she is slinking away from me again, downstairs, and bring her back up to shower with me. I want her to a have a few minutes each day when she doesn’t fear for her life.
Someone refused to do what I asked them to do recently. It was a good request, a needed step, but they dug in their heals. They put up a defensive shield. The whole thing was rather odd, and it came to me that there was more to the story than I know.
I thought about it, then I thought about how I love this friend. It felt good to remember the love and I put my focus on that.
We always have a choice, to laugh, to forget, to towel the cat, the choice to plant love in a spot where criticism wants to root.
I’m high on choices.
I am working on choosing to be positive, happy, proactive and loving.
I like myself that way — not negative.
